If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Power Management: ATI Catalyst vs. Open-Source ATI Driver

03-06-2009, 08:40 AM

Phoronix: Power Management: ATI Catalyst vs. Open-Source ATI Driver

Yesterday we broke the news that AMD will stop supporting the R300-500 GPUs in the Catalyst driver. There have been well over one hundred posts in the Phoronix Forums from ATI customers upset with this decision, but fortunately, there is first-rate open-source support available. AMD continues to release documentation and code while the X.Org development community has been hard at work on the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers along with Mesa and Gallium3D components. The main problem though is the open-source stack -- at this time -- providing poor gaming performance, but power management can also be a problem. In yesterday's article we provided some R500 comparative 2D and OpenGL benchmarks, but in this article are some power management results comparing the Catalyst 9.2 driver to the xf86-video-ati driver.

Comment

Michael,
It would be nice to see performance/power consumption. I know that is not easy or trivial to measure. Many folks might say that the open source drivers use less power because they don't do anything.

Comment

The difference between the two averages though is just 155 Milliwatts. The power consumption peaked at 24522 Watts, which is over 600 Milliwatts less than its open-source alternative. The power consumption bottomed out at 20112 Milliwatts, which is also less.

i hope this is supposed to milliwatts otherwise this card wouldnt be fit for a notebook
btw thanks for this great article

Comment

Was DynamicClocks enabled in xorg.conf? You say both drivers were left at their defaults, so probably not. Would be nice to see what impact (if any) it has.
Also since this is a notebook were power-consumption is critical, and performance usualy secondary, I think you should also test with lower power-states, as I think that's a more realistic useage-scenario.
But I do realize you did this article in a very short time, so I'm not complaining. I just make suggestions.